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2015-04-25

This Week's Prayer

Dear Source of Hope,

We pause to collectively acknowledge the world’s sadness, which is our own -- and to face straightforwardly what is real. As we would be a people of love and compassion, let us open ourselves to take in the pain, and respond with kindness and care.

Our hearts go out today to Nepal where a massive 7.8 earthquake has collapsed homes, temples, triggered avalanches, and killed some 1,500 people.

Our hearts go out to Yemen, where fighting between Houthi rebels and a Saudi-led coalition wreaks death and havoc and a humanitarian crisis.

Our hearts go out to Armenian people everywhere, as they observed this week the 100th anniversary of April 24,1915, when leaders and intellectuals of the Armenian communities in Ottoman Turkey were rounded up and massacred, marking the beginning of the Armenian genocide that would last eight years and kill more than 1.5 million Armenians.

Our hearts go out to Chile, where eruptions of the Calbuci volcano threaten farms and water supply with ash fallout.

Our hearts go out to the people of our country’s western states as wildfire season begins and drought conditions multiply many times the risk to lives, homes, and local economies.

Our hearts go out to Ethiopia, which is mourning with joint Christian and Muslim prayers, for the 30 or so Ethiopian Christians believed to have been killed on an ISIL videotape released last Sunday.

Our hearts go out to Baltimore, where a history of aggressive, sometimes brutal, police behavior oppresses particularly the African American community -- and particularly to the friends and family of 25-year-old Freddie Gray, dead with severe spinal cord injury while in police custody.

Our hearts go out to the intentional and unintentional victims of US drone strikes.

Our hearts go out with new hope to Hercules and Leo, two chimpanzees held at a research lab in Stony Brook. This week they became the first nonhumans in history to be covered by a writ of habeas corpus, allowing their detention to be challenged.

Remembering, then, all the love that we have ever known, may we show it back to this, our bruised and hurting world.

1. Openness to New Truth. "Religious liberalism depends first on the principle that revelation is continuous. Meaning has not been finally captured. Nothing is complete, and thus nothing is exempt from criticism." Our religious tradition is a living tradition because we are always learning.

2. Freedom. "All relations between persons ought ideally to rest on mutual, free consent and not on coercion." We freely choose congregational relationship and spiritual practice. We deny infallibility and resist hierarchical authority.

3. Justice. We are morally obligated to direct our "effort toward the establishment of a just and loving community. It is this which makes the role of the prophet central and indispensable in liberalism."

4. Institution Building. Religious liberals "deny the immaculate conception of virtue and affirm the necessity of social incarnation....Justice is an exercise of just and lawful institutional power." Institution building involves the messiness of claiming our power amid conflicting perspectives and needs, rather than the purity of ahistorical, decontextualized ideals.

5. Hope. "The resources (divine and human) that are available for the achievement of meaningful change justify an attitude of ultimate optimism."(For Adams's full text, see HERE. For Liberal Faith, see HERE.)